Documentary Review: Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy (dir by Robert Palumbo)

Posted on April 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s rare that I ever feel like I should apologize for having watched a documentary but that was the feeling I had after watching Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy.

This documentary examined the career and death of actor Matthew Perry, with most of the emphasis being put on Perry’s struggle with addiction. Excerpts were read from his book. Lots of clips were shared from Friends. People in the industry talked about what a charming actor Perry was and they also talked about how hard it is to free oneself from addiction. This is especially true when you’re rich enough to have a bunch of people around you who will literally respond to your every whim and not take a second to ask, “Are you sure?” One of the worst things about celebrity culture is that we tend to root for the worst until it actually happens. When an actor is publicly struggling with addiction or their mental health, it’s treated as entertainment It’s only after that actor dies that we talk about how tragic it was and people hop on social media to talk about how addiction is a disease and no one should be shamed for their struggle.

And that brings me to documentaries like this one. There’s something really hypocritical about these documentaries that take a real life tragedy and turn it into entertainment while pretending to be a tribute or a serious examination of the addiction crisis in America. For instance, this documentary tells you absolutely nothing that you didn’t already know about Matthew Perry and his tragic death and it really doesn’t do a good job of paying tribute to him as an actor either. Those clips from Friends are the same clips that you’ve seen on every other special about the life of Matthew Perry. There’s really no reason for this documentary to exist, other than to appeal to the desire of viewers to learn something sordid about a well-known figure. It’s a documentary that exploits Perry’s death while claiming to mourn it.

And I’m not saying anything that you haven’t already heard or which hasn’t been said by hundred other people. Nearly every review that I’ve read of this documentary says basically the same thing that I just said. It’s exploitive and doesn’t have much to add to our overall understanding of how someone with so much talent and so many fans could also be so self-destructive. And yet, while we all criticize documentaries like this, many of us still watch them. I still watch them. I watched this one. I learned absolutely nothing new and I felt fairly guilty afterwards. Matthew Perry’s death was a tragedy and a cautionary tale and, at the same time, it should take nothing away from the happiness that he brought his fans. He deserved better than this. For that matter, he deserved better than all of the speculative stories that came out after his appearance on the Friends Reunion Special.

But I can’t get self-righteous or too quick to condemn. Because I did watch this. I was bored, I saw that it was streaming, and I watched it. And I’ll probably watch the next trashy celebrity documentary that come out. I won’t feel good about it but I’ll probably do it. I doubt I’ll be alone.

Retro Television Review: Dance ‘Til Dawn (dir by Paul Schneider)

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1988’s Dance ‘Til Dawn! It can be viewed on YouTube.

It’s prom time and the seniors at Herbert Hoover High School are excited! Patrice Johnson (Christina Applegate) is especially excited because not only did she organize the prom but she’s also the leading contender to be elected prom queen. She’s looking forward to having a wonderful night with her boyfriend, Roger (Matthew Perry).

Patrice is especially excited because her only real competition for prom queen, Shelley (Alyssa Milano), has broken up with her jock boyfriend, Kevin (Brian Bloom). Shelley has declared that she will instead be attending a very mature and very fun college fraternity party. Meanwhile, Kevin will be attending prom but he will be coming with Angela (Tracey Gold), who has a reputation for being a bit nerdy. Kevin only asked Angela to prom because he was under the false impression that she’s easy but he soon finds himself falling for her for real.

Meanwhile, Shelley doesn’t really have a party to attend. Instead, she decides to spend prom night avoiding her friends and watching an old movie at the town’s movie theater. Shelley is convinced that no one from school will be at the theater. Instead, she runs into nerdy Dan (Chris Young), who also came to the theater because he didn’t have a prom date. Dan and Shelley end up having a fun time hanging out together.

While this is going on, all of the parents are having dramas of their own. Patrice’s embarrassing parents (Cliff de Young and Mary Frann) relive their own youth. Dan’s father (Alan Thicke) is convinced that Dan is not only the most popular kid at school but that Dan is also having a wonderful prom. And Angela’s parents (Edie McClurg and Kelsey Grammer) are so paranoid about the idea of Kevin trying to sleep with their daughter that they actually sneak into the prom to try to keep them from getting too close. Of course, they are mistaken for waiters and are immediately put to work.

I watched this two weeks ago, when I was still struggling to process the shock of Matthew Perry’s passing. Unfortunately, Matthew Perry is not in much of the film and it’s not really until the end of the film that he really gets a chance to show any of the sardonic wit for which he was best known. That said, Christina Applegate appears to be having fun as the snooty mean girl and she and Perry do make for a cute couple. Actually, all of the couples in the film are cute, with Alyssa Milano and Chris Young especially making for an adorable couple. This is a pleasant and, for many, nostalgic diversion, as long as you’re willing to accept that there is absolutely nothing go on beneath the film’s slick and occasionally colorful surface. The humor is broad, the messages are obvious, and, as always, it’s amusing to watch Kelsey Grammer running around in a panic.

Dance Til Dawn doesn’t really bring anything new to the high school genre but it’s still worthy of the name of Herbert Hoover.

Film Review: She’s Out of Control (dir by Stan Dragoti)

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Creepy movie, this is. Creepy, creepy movie.

The 1989 film, She’s Out of Control, tells the story of Doug Simpson (Tony Danza, showing why he never became a movie star), a radio manager and the single father of two daughters. When Doug goes out of town, his girlfriend, Janet (Catherine Hicks), gives 16 year-old Katie Simpson (Ami Dolenz) a make-over. When Doug leaves, Katie is awkward and wears braces and thick glasses. When he returns, she’s lost the braces, she’s switched to contacts, and every boy in the neighborhood wants a date with her. Doug freaks out.

And listen, I get it. I know that the point of the film is that parents are protective and I know that when I first started to develop and get noticed by boys, certain members of my family freaked out as well. (Of course, I was a little bit younger than Katie, who is portrayed as being the most absurdly sheltered 16 year-old of all time.) And I also understand that this film is not only a comedy but also an 80s comedy and, on top of that, an 80s comedy starring Tony Danza. So, I’m willing to accept that Doug’s reaction had to be exaggerated a bit for the joke, as it is, to qualify as being a joke.

But seriously, Doug freaks out so much that it’s just really creepy, not to mention a little bit insulting to teenage girls in general. Katie loses her glasses and her braces and suddenly, Doug is incapable of seeing her as being anything other than some sort of hypersexualized vixen. Doug goes from being protective to being rather obsessive and, since the film is told from his point of view, that means that, whenever the camera ogles Katie, it comes across as if Doug is ogling his own daughter and …. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty icky. The film’s title may be She’s Out Of Control but that’s never an accurate description of anything that Katie does over the course of the film. Instead, the only person who is truly out of control is Doug but he’s out of control to such an extent that it’s hard to watch him without hearing the voice of Dr. Phil in background, saying, “I’m a mandated reporter so I’m going to be makin’ a call as soon as the show is over….”

Speaking of everyone’s favorite unlicensed TV doctor, Doug starts to see a psychologist who is an even bigger jackass than Dr. Phil and that’s probably a good thing. Not only does Doug clearly need some mental help but it also allows the film to introduce Wallace Shawn as Dr. Fishbinder, the pompous author of a book that deals with how to raise an unruly teenager. Shawn is one of the film’s few good points. He plays Fishbinder as being such a self-important little weasel that he’s always entertaining to watch. Fishbinder encourages Doug to be strict and warns him that, if he isn’t, Katie will be pregnant in no time. Definitely, don’t let her to go to prom. “That’s where 87% of teenage girls lose their virginity!” Fishbinder exclaims, news to which Tony Danza responds by mugging for the camera like an extra in a Roger Corman monster film.

Katie has many suitors over the course of the film, some of whom are more memorable than others. Dana Ashbrook (who played drug dealer-turned-deputy Bobby Briggs on Twin Peaks) is the rebel with a heart of gold. A very young Matthew Perry is the spoiled rich kid who is only interested in one thing. An even younger Dustin Diamond (you might know him better as Screech Powers on Saved By The Bell) pops up as a kid who gawks at Katie on the beach. And while Doug comes across as being a jerk for most of the film, one can understand why anyone would be upset at the thought of Dustin Diamond coming any parent would be upset by the thought of Dustin Diamond coming anywhere near their daughter.

In the end, the main problem with the movie is that it asks you to sympathize with Doug Simpson but he’s so obviously overreacting to every little thing that you quickly grow tired of him and his worries. Of course, it doesn’t help that he’s played by Tony Danza, whose eyes often seem as if they’re on the verge of popping out of his head. Danza wanders through the movie with a perpetually shocked expression on his face and it gets old after a while. By the time he’s forcing his daughter’s friends to listen to songs from his old vinyl collection, most viewers will be done with him. It doesn’t help that Doug is described as being some sort of former hippie protester type. It’s hard to think of any other boomer actor who would be less convincing as a former hippie than Tony Danza.

She’s Out Of Control is a forgettable and, quit frankly, rather annoying little film. However, it has achieved a certain bit of fame because it was one of the film’s that Roger Ebert consistently cited as being one of the worst that he had ever reviewed. You have to keep in mind that Ebert was a film reviewer for over 40 years and during that time, he reviewed a lot of movies that he disliked. He even published at least three books devoted to negative reviews that he had written. Considering the amount of bad films that Ebert watched, the fact that he specifically cited She’s Out Of Control as one of the absolute worst films that he had ever sat through …. well, it was enough to encourage me to actually watch the film when I came across it on Starz. And, in this case, Ebert was right. It was pretty bad.

She’s Out Of Control is a dumb movie about dumb people doing dumb things. The key word is dumb.

Parallel Lives (1994, directed by Linda Yellen)

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

A large group of people gather together one weekend for a fraternity/sorority reunion. Since college, some of them have become rich and powerful. Some of them are now famous. Some of them are now seedy and disreputable. They all have college memories, though there’s such a wide variety of age groups represented that it’s hard to believe that any of them actually went to college together. After the men spend the day playing practical jokes and touch football and the women spend the night talking about their hopes and dreams, they wake up the next morning to discover the someone has murdered Treat Williams. A pony-tailed sheriff (Robert Wagner) shows up to question everyone.

Parallel Lives was made for Showtime with the help of the Sundance Institute. Today, it’s a forgotten film but, for some reason, it was very popular with American Airlines during the summer of 1997. That summer, when I flew to the UK, Parallel Lives was one of the movies that we were shown. (It was the second feature. The first feature was Down Periscope, a submarine comedy starring Kelsey Grammar. Fourteen year-old me enjoyed Down Periscope but, in retrospect, it wasn’t much of a flight.) A month and a half later, when I flew back to the U.S., Parallel Lives was again one of the films shown on the flight! For that reason, I may be the only person on the planet who has not forgotten that a film called Parallel Lives exists.

Parallel Lives, I later learned, was an entirely improvised film. The huge cast were all given their characters and a brief outline of the film’s story and they were then allowed to come up with their own dialogue. Unfortunately, no one did a very good job of it and the men were reduced to bro-ing it up while the women spent most of the movie having extended group therapy. The story doesn’t add up too much and, even when I rewatched it from an adult’s perspective, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to get out of everyone talking about how different the real world was from college. Technically, the film’s a murder mystery but you can’t improvise a successful murder mystery. This film proves that point.

Of course, it doesn’t help that there are 26 characters, all trying to get a word in at the same time. Some of the roles don’t make much sense. Dudley Moore shows up, playing an imaginary friend. (How do you improvise being a figment of someone’s imagination?) James Brolin introduces himself to everyone as being, “Professor Doctor Spencer Jones” and that appears to be as far as he got with his improv. Ben Gazzara is a gambler and Mira Sorvino is the prostitute that he brings to the reunion while Mira’s father, Paul Sorvino, moons the camera several times. Jack Klugman is a senator with Alzheimer’s and Patricia Wettig is his daughter. The majority of the movie centers around Jim Belushi, playing a reporter and falling in love with JoBeth Williams. Liza Minnelli, Helen Slater, Levar Burton, Lindsay Crouse, Matthew Perry, Ally Sheedy, and Gena Rowlands all have small roles. How did so many talented people come together to make such a forgettable movie and why did American Airlines decide it was the movie to show people on their way to another country? That’s the true mystery of Parallel Lives.